All I asking for is my body, 2024
Daguerreotypes on silver plates
Drawing its title from Milton Murayama’s 1975 novel All I Asking for is My Body, Binh Danh’s series of daguerreotype photographs on antique colonial style tableware examines the history of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Portuguese, and African laborers who were exploited and essentially enslaved by American plantations, forced to grow and harvest crops for little to no pay in the US during 19th-20th centuries. Starting in the 1880s, plantation owners began to import workers by sending agents to impoverished areas in foreign countries to secure binding labor contracts that guaranteed immigration to the US. Workers who landed in the US and in nearby autonomous colonies (i.e., Hawaii) found themselves in conditions that mirrored those of American Slavery.
Working in sundrenched fields for all hours of the day, laborers were overseen by plantation owners and managed by brutal overseers who enforced strict rules, imposed fines, and dispatched beatings for minor rule infractions. These contracted laborers were bound to 3-5-year contracts; deserters were detained and jailed. Danh’s work resurfaces this history, presenting the images of the laborers within a symbol of sustained American colonial power and status: colonial silver. The mirrored surfaces the silver platters reflect the image of viewer in both the image and the platter itself, that for the artist, conflates and complicates the temporal and identity-based histories of American colonial histories.
FotoFest 2024, Critical Geography, Houston, TX
